Gertrude Elion's “antiviral odyssey” | Hacker News Reader

Gertrude Elion's “antiviral odyssey”

nationalgeographic.com

43 pointstdhttt6 comments

Not sure what to think of this article, it reads like science version of Buzzfeed.

> Meet the woman who gave the world antiviral drugs > Then Gertrude Elion showed the doubters "what I could do on my own."

It totally disregards the role of some dozens of scientists in the process who came before her. It doesn't even mention Dr. Howard Schaeffer who actually discovered Acyclovir and went on to develop it with the help of Elion. Sadly, Schaeffer doesn't even have his own wikipedia page.

From wiki page on Aciclovir:

Nucleosides isolated from a Caribbean sponge, Cryptotethya crypta, were the basis for the synthesis of aciclovir. It was codiscovered by Howard Schaeffer following his work with Robert Vince, S. Bittner and S. Gurwara on the adenosine analog acycloadenosine which showed promising antiviral activity. Later, Schaeffer joined Burroughs Wellcome and continued the development of aciclovir with pharmacologist Gertrude B. Elion ...

The Wikipedia page has many of the details (though not the narrative) of this article, as well as some more:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gertrude_B._Elion

Also, it says she was Jewish; The meaning of her last name, Elion, in hebrew is "Superior" - apparently a fitting name given her achievements.

Not “a woman”. “The woman”

That's a software thing. Most titles that say "the man who" or "the woman who" use the definite article as a clickbait trick so HN's debaiter rewrites them. Occasionally it ought to be the other way and we correct those back.

Btw if you submit a title and the software rewrites it in a way that damages the meaning, you can always change it back using the 'edit' link. Just please don't use that to make it baity again.

Edit: I've changed it again to include the actual name of "the woman" and the phrase that (according to the article) she used to describe her own work. That seems much better than "the woman who gave the world", and also more respectful.

It is a crowning achievement of a life spent developing many other important drugs still in use. She almost certainly didn't do it as the only woman in her lab but she was at the front of getting women recognized in the field of biochemistry and drug development. Nothing of what I said should detract from her achievement, in fact the title seems to miss that she did something quite a bit more important prior to this particular achievement.

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